Kentucky Folkweb
YOU ARE HERE: Home -->Education -->Articles -->Why We Honor Bill Monroe
Why We Honor Bill Monroe by Thomas A. Adler
William
Smith Monroe (1911–1996), born in Rosine, Ohio County, Kentucky, was
a mandolin player and singer whose impact on the history of American music
can scarcely be overstated. The music he made during his life, eventually
dubbed "bluegrass" by others, perfectly expressed the seemingly
opposed concepts of tradition and innovation that are embodied in all vital
folk processes. In the musical life of Bill Monroe, a deep knowledge and respect
for the re-creation of old shared regional and family folkways was always
balanced by his own special gift for individual artistic creativity and by
his restless experimentation with novel forms of musical expression.
Monroe was increasingly described in his later years as the "Father of Bluegrass Music," in recognition of his key role in the creation of this internationally popular musical style. In 1938 he had named his newly formed band "Bill Monroe and His Blue Grass Boys" to acknowledge not only his love for Kentucky, the Bluegrass state, but also his own sense that his personal repertoire and style were rooted in a particular place and time. In the post-World War II years, the strikingly novel sound of Monroe's "classic" bluegrass emerged. The bluegrass sound clearly differed from other so-called "hillbilly" and "folk" styles then being marketed as country music. It embodied a new small-band model which showed off Monroe's blazing blues-influenced mandolin picking, in combination with the unique rolling five-string banjo style of Earl Scruggs, plus brilliant and distinctive guitar, fiddle, and string bass playing, all woven together in a jazz-like performance of sequential "breaks" featuring each player in turn. Bluegrass singing perpetuated and melded the old traditional repertoires of balladry and sentimental songs, sacred gospel numbers, and hot blues into a new kind of "high, lonesome sound," while adding its own standard new compositions and two-, three-, or four-part harmony.
By the mid-1950s, the sound of Monroe's Blue Grass Boys had so energized the airwaves of country-music radio that it became clearly thought of as a new style, one that was being copied by string-band musicians everywhere, amateurs and professionals alike. The new style needed a new name, so musicians and fans eventually named the new style "bluegrass music," and right from the start they both recognized and argued about limits and appropriate boundaries for its excitingly contradictory blend of old and new impulses.
For more than forty years after the style received a name, Bill Monroe kept on creating his own music, giving us example after example to show how bluegrass songs and tunes should sound with his own compositions: "Blue Moon Of Kentucky," "Uncle Pen," "My Little Georgia Rose," "On And On," "Rawhide," and hundreds of others. Monroe also served as the major compass point for others who, in the name of continuing and extending the journey he had begun, ventured stylistically outwards in every direction.
In 1996 Bill Monroe passed away, just a few days short of his 85th birthday.
His passing, and his lifetime of contributions and honors, were noted extensively
in the national and international media. He had been inducted into the Country
Music Hall of Fame in 1970, received the National Heritage Fellowship Award
in 1982, and was inducted into the new International Bluegrass Music Association
Hall of Honor in 1991. He was given the National Academy of Recording Arts
and Sciences Lifetime Achievement Award during the 1993 Grammy Awards show,
and in 1995 was presented with the National Medal of the Arts by President
Bill Clinton. Today, Bill Monroe's grave in Rosine has become the destination
of musical pilgrims by the hundreds and thousands who wish to honor him and
remember his traditions.
Yet bluegrass music goes on. It lives and is thriving today, not only in the
growing industry that links full-time professional bluegrass performers with
record companies and radio and television and other media channels, but also
in the constantly expanding and culturally metamorphic world of home-made,
amateur, and part-time bluegrass bands and musicians. Bluegrass music lives
whenever and wherever it is played or replayed, and each performance, no matter
its context or stylistic nuances, can be properly thought of as another link
in the chain that Bill Monroe began to forge more than a half-century ago.
In a similar and highly appropriate spirit of remembrance, the first Festival of Kentucky Folklife celebrates Bill Monroe's life and musical traditions with a special tribute concert featuring J.D. Crowe & the New South, the Osborne Brothers, and Ricky Skaggs & Kentucky Thunder. By presenting in Bill Monroe's name some of the memories, words, and music of three distinguished Kentucky-born bluegrass acts, we hope not only to provide the audience with a first-class entertaining evening, but also to stimulate our entire festival audience to reflect on Monroe's immense musical legacy. In a musical lifetime of blending and re-inventing his own received traditions, and all the while fusing them with those of other gifted musicians, Bill Monroe created an enduring cultural element in the shared inheritance that is America, and it is the most paradoxical of such items: a new tradition.
